TS 549 
.08 

""" HE STORY OF 

EDWARD HOWARD 

AND THE FIRST 

AMERICAN 
WATCH 




T^he Story of 

Edward Howard 

and 

the First 

American Watch 



The Story of 

Edward Howard 

and 

the First 

American Watch 




J4iAAtA/ .^ - 



-K- 1 r ■v-?^ fc- 



E. Howard Watch Works 
Boston^ Massachusetts 




Id'*' 



©Ci.A288716 



The Story of 

Edward Howard and the 

First American Watch 



THE American Watch, like practically 
every other great achievement of 
American inventors, was wrought out 
under discouragements that would have 
appalled ordinary men. 

While Morse was struggling against the 
sickening disappointments of the telegraph, 
and Goodyear was undergoing privation in his 
search for the secret of curing India rubber, 
Edward Howard, with the assistance of capital 
furnished by friends, was struggling with the 
creation of the watch industry. 

Edward Howard was apprenticed in i Sip- 
to Aaron Willard, Jr., son of Aaron Willard, 
who was the youngest of three brothers, born 
in Grafton, Mass. 

The Willards were noted for their fine 
clock work. Simon, the oldest, settled in 



The Story of Edward Howard 

Roxbury in 1771 at the "Sign of the Clock." 
He made his first clock at the age of 13, and 
was the most ingenious of all the Willards. 
He made turret clocks for Boston, Phila- 
delphia, New York and the University of 
Virginia. While in Virginia he became 
acquainted with Jefferson and Madison, with 
whom he corresponded for years. He made 
and set up the clocks in United States Senate 
and House. "He never considered profit, the 
quality ofwork being everything. His clocks, 
great and small, are just as good, after the lapse 
of a century, as when they left his hands." 

Aaron Willard, Jr., learned the trade from 
his father, and to him Edward Howard was 
apprenticed in 1829. Young Howard was a 
mechanical genius. Clockmaking was play 
for him. Some of the clocks that he made 
as a boy are as good to-day as when they 
were first put up. He made all kinds of clocks 
— for halls and churches, tower clocks, etc. 

He was one of the finest workmen that ever 
lived. His "bent," as he says, was all for finer 
and more delicate mechanism. It was natural 
that he should consort with the best watch- 



The Story of Edward Howard 

makers he could find. Watchmaking fasci- 
nated him. He studied it; saw its weaknesses 
and dreamed of overcoming them and of 
revolutionizing the watch industry of the 
world. 

Think of the immortal nerve of that raw 
American boy who had never been outside 
of a little Massachusetts town, yet who dared 
aspire to better the work of the master crafts- 
men of Europe with ten generations of watch- 
making behind them. Watchmaking ranked 
with the fine arts. It had its history, its 
traditions, its guilds and its court subsidies, 

Howard, writing in later life of his early 
struggles, remarks: "One difficulty I found 
was that watchmaking did not exist in the 
United States as an industry. There were 
watchmakers, so called, at that time, and there 
are great numbers of the same kind now, but 
they never made a watch; their business being 
only to clean and repair." 

He further says: "I knew from experi- 
ence that there was no proper system 
employed in making watches. The work was 
all done by hand. Now handwork is superior 



The Story of Edward Howard 

in many of the arts because it allows varia- 
tion according to the individuality of the 
worker. 

"But in the exquisitely fine wheels and 
screws and pinions that make up the parts of 
a watch, the less variation the better. Under- 
stand that some of these parts are so fine as 
to be almost invisible to the naked eye. A 
variation of one five-thousandth of an inch 
would throw the watch out altogether or make 
it useless as a timepiece. As I say, all of 
these minute parts were laboriously cut and 
filed out by hand, so it will readily be under- 
stood that in watches purporting to be of the 
same size and of the same makers there were 
no two aHke, and there was no interchange- 
ability of parts. Consequently it was 'cut and 
try.' A great deal of time was wasted and 
many imperfections resulted." 

It was Howard's dream to overcome the 
imperfections by inventing automatic ma- 
chines that would produce each part with 
absolute precision. 

There's a childlike simpHcity in the notes 
he has left about himself and his work. 



The Story of Edward Howard 

This idea of automatic machines was dar- 
ing and revolutionary enough in all conscience. 
Yet he says of it simply: "The development 
of the plan was the result of long thinking;" 
and further: "I came in for much ridicule 
from those to whom I confided it. They 
laughingly said, and I thought with some 
reason, that one of my machines, if I ever got 
it running, would be a greater marvel than the 
finest watch that ever was made. 

"There was almost a superstitious- belief 
in the necessity for handwork in making a 
watch movement. To those who criticized 
me for trying to do away with handwork I 
replied that I expected to make by hand the 
machines that were to make my watch parts, 
so it was handwork but one step removed." 

Howard went into business for himself in 
1 840, risking all that he possessed and all that 
he could command from the few friends who 
believed in him. He determined to establish 
systematic watchmaking and to invent labor- 
saving machinery for producing perfect and 
interchangeable parts. 

His first step was to build a small factory 



10 



The Story of Edward Howard 

in Roxbury, Mass. — the first watch factory In 
the New World. 

Writing of this period he says : " It is 
almost needless to say that we met with many 
obstacles. We were told by importers and 
dealers in watches that we would never be able 
to carry out our plans and that our project 
would be an utter failure. Some of our friends 
even told us we were crazy to attempt such 
an undertaking. But we were Americans and 
had a sufficient quantity of the proverbial grit, 
and at least believed in ourselves even if others 
did not have so much faith. 

"We could not import and use foreign 
help unacquainted with our methods and tools, 
so we had to instruct our men from the be- 
ginning. There were many times when we 
felt that the predictions of the importers would 
prove true, but perseverance conquered. 

"The financial problem was a hard matter 
to solve as the unbelief in our success was 
universal. Frequently it was difficult to raise 
the money needed to get materials or pay our 
workmen. We struggled along for six years 
before the tide turned. 



II 



The Story of Edward Howard 

"Without the financial assistance of good 
friends in Boston, watchmaking would prob- 
ably not have existed at the present time as 
an organized industry in the United States. 
This may seem to be a sweeping statement 
but no one can conceive the trials we endured. 
We hear about going through Purgatory but 
that must be a pleasure compared with what 
we experienced at that time. 

"We were trying to establish under one 
roof an industry embracing a dozen distinct 
trades. Such a thing had never been done 
before and we were still further handicapped in 
our undertaking by having inexperienced 
assistants. Weh-ad to teach ourselves first and 
then teach others. Our progress was slow and 
expensive; and there was much bad work that 
we had to throw away. 

"Our first watch was made to run for eight 
days, but was discarded because the main- 
spring was too long and cumbersome. 

" We did not know how to make a jewel, 
or a dial or to do proper watch gilding or to 
produce a mirror polish on steel. We had to 
study and work over these operations until 



12 



The Story of Edward Howard 

after many attempts one at last would be 
successful. 

"We had to invent all the tools to make 
the different parts. After being designed or 
invented they had to be made in the factory 
by our own machinists in order to have them 
perfect and durable. Attempts were made to 
have them made outside but it was impossible 
to get them constructed carefully and of the 
exact and uniform sizes needed. 

"It was nearly three years before the 
establishment had fairly and fully started in 
the business of making watches, and then we 
found that we would need ten times as much 
room, so we set about building a very much 
larger factory at Waltham, Mass." 

The expenses of this new factory were 
greater than was anticipated. The constant 
experimenting, the cost of working models, 
the spoiled materials, rejected work, the build- 
ing of new machines and the comparatively 
small marketable output, a thousand discour- 
agements and the antagonism of the entire 
watch and jewelry trade finally brought mat- 
ters to a crisis and Howard saw ruin staring 



13 



The Story of Edward Howard 

him in the face. Some of his associates com- 
plained that he was too scrupulous about the 
perfection of the watches that left his hands. 

He says on this point: "Friends turned 
from me saying I was not practical. Work- 
men who left me or were discharged com- 
plained that I was exacting and expected the 
impossible because I would not tolerate a 
botch of any kind. I would rather break up 
a watch movement than have it go out im- 
perfect. My standard for every watch that 
bore my name was that it be fit to present 
to the President of the United States. They 
had me quite humbled and ashamed with the 
thought that I was not fair to those interested, 
but I could not bring myself to do otherwise. 

" Of course, men who were looking at the 
financial side could not feel as I did about 
my watch. They could not understand that 
the watch was the end I sought, that I would 
give everything I possessed, even life itself, 
to see all work out as I had planned." 

This was the temper of the man as attested 
by all who knew him. It was currently be- 
lieved at the time that Howard was the model 



14 



The Story of Edward Howard 

for the character of Owen Warland in 
Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story, "The 
Artist of the Beautiful." 

Howard was a workman of astonishing 
dexterity and the highest ideals. His venture 
created a great deal of stir, because of its 
apparent impracticabiHty, and Hawthorne, 
living in Concord at the time, could not have 
failed to hear a great deal of it. The story 
was published in June, 1 844, only a year or so 
after the first Howard watch was completed. 

The Howard factory failed in 1857. 

The plant, tools and machinery were 
taken over by men in Waltham and became 
the nucleus of the great industry there and 
incidentally the parent of watch factories in 
other parts of the country. 

Howard's characteristic comment on this 
state of affairs was this: "I had to begin at the 
bottom and make all tools anew. I returned 
to my old factory at Roxbury, founded a new 
company with the understanding that I was 
to have my way about the quality of watches 
that bore the name HOWARD." 

How he succeeded is a matter of history. 



15 



The Story of Edward Howard 

The output was limited but a Howard watch 
was a prized possession. Men paid $500 
for them in the early sixties. 

A prominent citizen of Philadelphia (a 
retired business man) wrote the Howard 
factory recently that he had personally carried 
a Howard watch for fifty years and that its 
variation to-day is not more than one second 
in twenty-four hours, or one second in eighty- 
six thousand. 

Howard had perfected his marvellous 
automatic machinery for the making of the 
delicate watch parts so that of a thousand 
pieces one would be exactly like the other. 

Three thousand two hundred patents 
granted by the Patent Office at Washington 
in the field of watch and clock invention are 
directly or indirectly due to his initiative. 

He had made the first practical application 
of the stem-winding mechanism designed in a 
crude form by a London watchmaker in 1 750. 

Now comes the most important work that 
Edward Howard accomplished in the direc- 
tion of timekeeping accuracy. 

We have noted his complaint of the varia- 



16 



The Story of Edward Howard 

tion of individual parts made by hand and 
learned how he overcame that difficulty. 

Next, we find him making a curious dis- 
covery, viz.: "Every watch has its individ- 
uahty. Pick out and put together two sets of 
absolutely perfect and identical parts made by 
machinery that does not vary one twenty- 
thousandth of an inch, run them under exactly 
the same conditions, and each watch will 
vary slightly from the other and from the 
standard." 

He had gotten away from individuality in 
the parts only to meet it again in the assembled 
movement. And that discovery was the be- 
ginning of the Howard constructive adjust- 
ment that is obtained in no other watch 
factory to this day. 

It takes months to adjust a Howard watch, 
notwithstanding the fact that it is a better 
timekeeper than the usual high-grade watch 
when it is first put together. The Howard 
requirements are higher. 

It is run and timed for a period on its face, 
on its back, in different positions. Then in an 
oven with intense heat, then in a refrigerator 



17 



^he Story of Edward Howard 

under extreme cold. Accurate record being 
kept of its performance from day to day. 

When it varies it goes into the hands of an 
expert who overhauls it until he finds the 
cause of variation, corrects it — then the watch 
starts on its test performance all over again. 

The result is that the Howard adjustment 
when completed is good for fifty years (bar- 
ring accidents or violence). It will stand 
more jolt and jar than any other watch, being 
adjusted to vibration as well as change of 
temperature. 

Howard thought more of his scientific 
adjustment than anything else he accom- 
plished. He left minute instructions and pro- 
visions for its continuance along with certain 
data that he would never divulge during his 
lifetime nor trust even with the patent authori- 
ties, though it is likely the matters were not in 
their nature subject to patent right protection. 

Previous to 1853 the American markets 
were controlled by Swiss and English makers 
and there was much prejudice against 
Howard's product. 

Howard writes in 1850: "Americans 



18 



^he Story of Edward Howard 

have never been free from a snobbishness 
that loves to display a foreign trade mark. 
Just as the footman is more lordly than his 
master, so the tradesman is more snobbish 
than his customer." 

But in spite of the ban on Howard by 
importers and retail jewelers, he was instru- 
mental in driving the Swiss watches from the 
country. 

In 1866 American watches were exten- 
sively introduced into London. The English 
watch industry declined. English makers 
came here and bought American watch 
machinery but could do little with it. Howard 
forced the Swiss makers to buy American 
machinery and Swiss watches are made on 
American machines to-day. 

There is a record for you ! That half- 
baked Roxbury boy with his idea — the scoff 
and butt of his companions — a lad that 
couldn't have got a job at the bench with the 
Swiss makers — yet he broke the back of a 
world industry and brought the richest guilds 
in Europe to Massachusetts begging for his 
machinery that they might continue their 



19 



The Story of Edward Howard 

trade. And yet there are American jewelers 
who offer Swiss watches as a superior im- 
ported article. 

Years later, the Howard factory was again 
removed to Waltham — the scene of its early 
failure — where it is now established as a 
splendid enterprise and a monument to a man 
who believed in himself; who countenanced 
no sham in his work and who lived to make 
the finest watches in the world. 

In 1864, when the premium on gold put 
the price of watches so high, Secretary Stanton 
showed President Lincoln an expensive Swiss 
watch. Lincoln opened the back cap, ex- 
amined the movement curiously and returned 
it to Stanton saying: "I reckon that's a 
Swiss watch, but it was made with American 
machines." 

"It's a more elaborate watch than we make 
in this country, Mr. Lincoln," Stanton said. 

"Yes," replied Lincoln, "it reminds me 
of the boy who wanted to teach his grand- 
mother to suck eggs." 

Lincoln carried a Howard. 



20 



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